The Treatise of the Pool

A short Judeo-Arabic manual of the inner life: clear the heart as one clears a pool of its silt, and the water — the divine influx — will fill it of itself. Stages of solitude, of attention, and of the master's guidance follow.

Maimonides' grandson, writing a Sufi manual in Hebrew letters. The image he chooses for the receptive heart is a pool, which is the Tree's own figure for Yesod — arrived at by a man who had every reason to know both vocabularies.